After watching the terrible Minneapolis bridge collapse recently a curiosity has seemed to have crept into the US public about the safety of bridges they use each day. David Lord is facilitating the discovery of safety ratings for US bridges by displaying 700,000 of them on the US Bridge Map mashup. David is combining the National Bridge Inventory database found on the US Department of Transportation's Federal Highway Administration website with Google Maps so you can easily map locations of bridges in your area. Each bridge location provides detailed information such as roads that it intersects with, the year it was built, details about the length and width of the bridge and the ever important "Sufficiency Rating". While there are ways to view the number of bridges for large areas, the best way to use this mashup is to zoom in as close as possible for a given area and to see all bridges displayed for a very small area.. and be patient! Info can be slow to display.
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3 comments:
This is absolutely amazing. I am a reporter at a daily newspaper and wanted so badly to crunch this data and produce a similar map for our readers on deadline but was stumped by the FHWA data. Congratulations on a job well-done. I'm going to give it another try on my own time. Thanks for posting!
doesn't work in safari!
works in firefox on mac though....
That's a terrific map. I've coincidentally created my own version of this map using the same data, but for Kentucky only. It works a bit differently, where you can type in an a city or address and it gives you the closest bridges around you. Seems to run a bit faster, but then again, I've got less data and likely less traffic :)
http://www.metromapper.org/index-bridges.php
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